Yes — there is a serious philosophical argument in what you're getting at, but I would sharpen the distinction between Descartes himself and a possible Cartesian inheritance.

For Descartes, the world of bodies is res extensa: extended matter governed by mechanical laws. The thinking self, res cogitans, is categorically different. That creates a potentially dangerous asymmetry: subjectivity is where meaning, consciousness, and moral significance are concentrated, while the external world can appear as something fundamentally quantitative and manipulable.

The spider-web image is particularly apt. If I am the conscious centre and everything outside me is essentially extension and mechanism, then the world can start looking less like a community of beings and more like an enormous machine whose threads I can pull.

That can support a kind of technological or economic instrumentalism:

If nature has no intrinsic interiority, then why should manipulating, exhausting, or violently reorganising it constitute a moral violation?

But there's an important complication: Descartes did not straightforwardly conclude that we may do whatever we want to nature. His philosophy contains a distinction between mind and matter, but the moral permission you are describing is a later extrapolation. Indeed, Descartes' own theological commitments put constraints on what human beings ought to do.

Your Schopenhauer comparison is interesting because it produces almost the inverse problem.

For Schopenhauer, the world isn't merely dead mechanism. Beneath representation lies Will — blind, striving, irrational, fundamentally indifferent to our conscious purposes. In that sense, the problem isn't that reality lacks an inner force, but that its inner force is non-rational desire.

So you get two rather different pictures:

Cartesian tendency	Schopenhauerian tendency
World as mechanism	World as blind striving
Matter has no consciousness in itself	Reality has an underlying Will
Rational subject stands apart from nature	Human rationality is itself subordinate to Will
Nature can become an object of manipulation	We are ourselves driven by forces we don't control
Danger: instrumentalisation	Danger: resignation to irrational desire

And your drunk-driving example exposes something even deeper.

If one says, "I am driven by Schopenhauerian Will, therefore I have no reason to restrain myself," then Will becomes an excuse rather than an explanation. The fact that a desire is causally powerful doesn't make it morally authoritative.

You could therefore formulate the philosophical problem as:

What happens when we confuse an explanation of human behaviour with a justification of human behaviour?

"I wanted to drive drunk" may have a perfectly good causal explanation — impulse, pleasure-seeking, neurological state, social conditioning, Will, etc. But none of those explanations answers the normative question: "Should I do it?"

And this is where the Cartesian split becomes particularly interesting. If the conscious rational self is radically separated from the material world, you can end up with two opposite temptations:

1. Nature becomes merely manipulable stuff.
2. The self becomes merely a detached spectator that rationalises whatever its underlying drives have already decided.

The first gives you something like technological/economic domination of nature.

The second gives you something like Schopenhauerian fatalism: "I am merely the locus through which forces operate, so why pretend that I am responsible?"

A richer alternative would reject both. The world needn't be a Cartesian machine or a Schopenhauerian blind Will. And human beings needn't be either sovereign minds standing outside nature or helpless puppets of it.

That's actually where thinkers such as Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Levinas, and Hans Jonas become very relevant: they each, in different ways, challenge the idea that there is a clean division between an isolated subject and an inert external world.

Your basic intuition, then, can be stated quite powerfully:

Once the world is reduced to objectified extension, moral restraint can begin to look like an irrational inhibition imposed by the subject upon its own freedom. And once the subject itself is reduced to blind Will, moral restraint can likewise appear as an illusion. The philosophical challenge is to recover a conception of reality in which neither nature nor the self is merely an object for exploitation.